Comprehensive Process for Creating Environments Faster w/Maya & UE5 - MAKING OF “Globe Staircase”

in this video I'm going to break down the making of the globe staircase environment I'm always trying to experiment with different workflows primarily to allow me to create environments faster so that way you can go from start to finish in the shortest amount of time while still having the quality of your environments pushed to your max potential to your max levels so in this particular environment what I wanted to do was Focus entirely modeling the environment in my 3D modeling application in my case it's Maya and I wanted to FOC focus on the modeling process create the entire environment in Maya and then just simply export everything out of Maya into u5 so I don't have to reconstruct the environment inside u5 I would just export everything I've done into u5 and then I would have a complete environment exactly the way I had it in Maya and then I wanted to focus using quickel Bridge the meas skan assets primarily the materials and decals to texture the environment so that allowed me to focus on modeling and not environment construction and then just texture the asset sets using quickel bridge and then just use U 5's lighting Lumen to finish everything off so here is the complete breakdown of everything I did for the making of the globe staircase environment the idea and the inspiration behind this dearm came from a single image I found this about a year ago just looking for other the things until this popped up and I thought it was very cool I like the concrete brutalist architecture but I also had that science fiction Vibe futuristic style and I usually save these images as ideas for possibly to come back to so this idea has been on my mind for almost a year and it's something that I wanted to do but just didn't have time to do it so once I decided to work on this I collected more reference images but I didn't want to recreate the image itself model it one for one and just make a copy of what I have from reference to model and to U 5 I wanted to put my own spin on it put my own ideas into it and one of the ways you could expend on the reference image itself without having to copy is you take an image into Photoshop and then use Genera a fill to give you ideas so you simply bring in the photo into Photoshop you expand the canvas so you have a lot more space around it then you select the image using the Mory tool then you invert that selection and then you use generative fill and let Photoshop AI gen to fill create the information for you and give you ideas and I ran through a few options and created this image for me so essentially gave me an idea of this underground environment theme with some kind of tunnels below it that lead to nowhere and this is where it clicked for me and this is what I wanted to do so once I had the idea I wanted to jump right into Maya and begin modeling for the entire modeling process I used Maya and as I mentioned I wanted to experiment with the work flow I've created this environment entirely in Maya and then just export in everything as one single fpx and then bringing it over into u5 so I did not want to separate and create modular pieces export them one by one or even using the game explor and then having to reconstruct this entire environment in u5 I simply wanted to have what I see and what I'm modeled in Maya and I have the same exact thing exported and then imported in u5 that was my biggest thing that I wanted to focus on not having to reconstruct this in u5 as you usually would have to now this process of course will not allow or it would be very difficult to expand on this environment so essentially what I see here in in in Maya it says exactly what I get in u5 and there are no variations that I could expand on so most of these pieces right here they're still somewhat modular but they're not on the grid they're not being snapped to the 0000 World space for export I essentially split some of these pieces up uh so I can easily construct this inside Maya but I did not export one single piece and then having to duplicate that in u5 I just made it easier for me to construct this inside Maya so these are not really modular but they are repeating for easier modeling and Construction in my and here's what the environment looks like in u5 again all of these pieces are exact ly what I had in Maya solid pieces of geometry static meeses that were exported from Maya and then brought into u5 so all of these are separate meeses as you saw in Maya that were just simply exported as a single fbx and then on import I did not combine the meshes and then I simply dragged all the single meshes from the fbx from the import and I'll show you uh the process that I did in just a minute but essentially here are all the pieces that I brought in and these were brought in as a single fpx I did not import them one by one and then I simply selected all of these and dragged them into the level and they were it reconstructs your environment inside u5 now again the downside for this and I'll kind of come back to this is the pivot point because I exported everything as a single fpx so I essentially selected everything inside the level and this is that front wall I just moved it out of the way so I can see inside I essentially selected all the meshes I exported them as a single fpx that means that all the pivot Points for all the static meshes get repositioned into the 0000 World space which is somewhere around here so this is why when you bring things into ue5 as a single fpx and then don't combine the meshes so they're all separate all the pivot Points are repositioned in the world origin so this is the downside of this method is I can't really take any of these assets and just duplicate and reposition I could but again it's not very user friendly because of the pivot point now I could reposition the pivot point but then I wouldn't need to use that method so if I will create a module pieces then I would uh break this up a lot more I would have these pillars as a single static mesh the wall maybe this this wall on the bottom would be a single static mesh wall on the top maybe a single static mesh the stairs would be their own separate mesh and that of course the Pivot Point would be exactly where I needed to be in order to duplicate this across the environment but again that was not the point for this because I wanted to create this in my model it have it be done and just simply focus on texturing and lighting inside u5 and with that I really created this environment a lot quicker than if I had to reconstruct it inside u5 by creating individual modular pieces so I really love working with this method of how fast I was able to model this UV it bring it into u5 and then just texture it and let it now let me cover a bit more about the process of model model in and then exporting from Maya to u5 and some of the options that I used the first thing I want to touch on is the scale modeling things to scale from Maya to u5 so they one to one is very important now I have a few tutorials on making sure that you create things to scale in my to5 so I'm going to link those in the description as well as within the blog post but the first thing you want to make sure is you have your grid set up correctly in Maya to match you5 and here is mine in a separate tutal I'll go over what each of these mean but you can just note and maybe change them now and then go into depth by watching the tutorial and you can also see that I have a scale reference inside my scene human mannequin that I exported from u5 and then imported it into Maya to help me build things to scale and the height of this scale reference is 180 cm which is about roughly 6 feet so the environment and the architecture needs to match the human reference scale you have inside the scene so this is the very first important part of creating environments in Maya for u4 or for u5 is having the right scale and dimensions so everything you create looks real doesn't seem too small doesn't seem too big and you don't have those obvious proportion issues and once you get the scale and the dimensions down and then you are free to model the environment that will look right here is the first rough blockout that I did I kept the geometry extremely simple very itive so I can get the size the dimensions and the overall mood and feel and essence of the environment I wanted to get the proportions down I wanted to get the right construction of the environment and then bring it into u5 and begin testing lighting just to see what it would look like so all these are primitive shapes and I simply created one then duplicated and just basically uh created the entire scene what it would look like in order to test the dimensions and uh entire environment so that way I can bring it into u5 as soon as possible and this was my template the blueprint onto which the final environment was created so this is another crucial step in a production pipeline making sure that you have your blockout right because that's going to be your blueprint for the final environment if the size is not correct here then it's not going to be correct in the final work so this is where you test things out you move things this is a very fluid flexible process of figuring things out so once I had the block out what I did was let me move this wall back so we have something in front here's the entire export process that I did I would select everything then I would go to file export selection make sure I was exporting as fbx export choose a folder what you want to export I'm going to overwrite this scene test everything will be exported into a single fpx file here are some of my settings smoothing groups smooth mesh make sure it's named location selected and click export selection and yes because I'm overwriting an existing file but for you you'll have a new file created so it takes all these selected meshes and exports them into a single fpx file then in u5 start new scene and I usually choose the basic map template because it gives you all the necessary actors to start with right away you don't have to insert them yourself and then choose a folder where you're going to begin to import things into for the project so I'm I'm actually going to choose the test folder and let's do static meshes so this is where I want to import things into as I show you in this tutorial but for me I have a dedicated folder selected and created for all the assets and the maps and the materials to organize so let me go to static meses then take that single fpx file and just simply drag and drop it right into this folder inside the content browser so this is the scene test and here are the settings that you would want to begin to enable and disable for this workflow process so I did build nanites for the meshes because I was going to use Lumen lighting and nanites and Lumen works really well together I did generate missing collisions so that way I can spawn inside the environment and walk around however I did have to tweak a few and I'll show you that later I did generate L mvs as a default just in case if I wanted to come back and do baked lighting with these meshes but these also depend on your UVS which we'll cover in a bit then the important property you want to make sure you do not have enabled is combined meshes I want to have all the separate meshes that I have eventually as the final environment I do not want to have this fbx combin as one single object if I enable this all the selected meshes become one static mesh so the entire environment becomes one single mesh and I do not want that I want to have everything I have as separate having separate meshes also works best with Lumen because Lumen does not like large meshes and you will have problems lighting environments that are made up of one large complex mesh so you want to break those things up this is why modular meshes work really well with Roman just the way Lumin works it needs separation of meshes rather than one single large environment mesh and also I did create new materials this assigns a Lambert material on top of my meshes so that way I don't have that wall grid that you see here on the floor so with all these settings go ahead and import all or import doesn't really matter anything that comes up here I can go ahead and ignore because this has to do with UVS and since uh this black out does not have any UVS and all the static meshes all the exported geometry has not been uved yet uh this is why you get a lot of the errors and here are all the meshes that made up the blackout environment now there is a problem with the names and I'll show you that later but in the blackout process I do not save this I simply wanted to create the blackout and temporarily export and import so I can see what the environment looks like see how the lighting works and just kind of the mood in the feel the scale that everything is working correctly in the end in this blockout process I did not save this and this is very important because I wanted to have this iteration process of constantly bringing things in testing and then getting back into Maya to continue modeling and these names eventually I did change and you had just have to rename your meshes and then the final environment everything was renamed and it was imported correctly with all the proper names so that's something we're also going to come back to but here are all the separate meshes so how do you construct this environment very quickly without having to drag every single one of these meshes and position them because that would be a pain and that kind of kills the entire experimentation process that I had in mind so you simply select all the meshes and ignore the materials actually this is a static mesh here's the material that I created by default which I wanted which assigns a flat off white kind of grayish color to it so it's easier to see the lighting and see the construction again I did not want to have this grid on top of all the meshes so with all the static measures selected just simply left click hold and drag them into the level and then let's go inside and position and take a look here it is now the one thing I also do is I make sure that with all the meses selected I go to location and I type in zero for every single one so this positions all the meshes add the private point to the world origin 0000 World space so this means that if I ever let's say delete this mesh and I want to reposition like I forgot to place it I can just simply drag this into the level and I would just zero out the location it would be positioned exactly where it was in Maya and this is why I zero out all the meshes instead of just dragging them and leaving them the environment would be created but then if you ever move any of the meshes by accident let's say or you forgot or you just need like you basically moved it by accident and then you want to reposition it super simple way to reposition back to where it needs to be in the environment is just zero out the locations and here it is here's your entire environment exactly how it looks in my the next thing and we're going to cover this now because it has to do with lighting you can see that the auto exposure is just eliminating the entire scene and it autocorrects and makes the environment bright and we do not want this especially when you just want to see the lighting uh the indirect lighting coming in from up above and I wanted to experiment with the lighting and see what it looks like without having this Auto exposure taking place and this has to do with postprocess volume so you usually need the post-process volume right away in order to clamp those values as you work and I always when I start a new map I always disable auto exposure or control it so uh go to visual effects and insert post process volume into your level make sure it's selected and then go to details and type in Unbound so you can search for it and enable infinite extent Unbound this will make this post process volume Universal now we still haven't clamped or controlled those values so make sure the post process volume is selected and and go to exposure for this method I am going to use a different method that I usually use usually I just enable minimum and maximum values and change these to zero and this climbs it down however because this is more of indirectly lit environment uh I will not have any direct lighting other than the directional light bouncing above the hole and then just entering into this environment so I'm not going to have actual direct light in here so I used a slightly different method an alternate method of controlling Auto exposure so instead of using these values let me go ahead and disable them so that's going to start taking effect the auto exposure for this method I used mirroring mode enable this and change it to manual then enable exposure compensation and apply physical camera exposure and then come back to exposure compensation and begin to adjust this so I set it I think in the end it was 13 but I started playing around with the values in order to control the exposure compensation and make it make the environment kind of back to where it needs to be and this is where you can increase this value for indirectly lit areas of the environment and for environments that are primarily lit with indirect lighting and increase this value in order to infuse it with more light so I think in the end it was 13 maybe 12 but basically have this value to play around to clamp the auto exposure and then if you press contrl L hold it down and I just adjusted my direction light right about there so here I was kind of uh testing the blackout environment and seeing how the lighting would look and let me increase it to 13 so you can see right away that just a black out once I get the scale once I get the right size and then I export it for testing and then I begin to play around with lighting my environment already is there I can see the final piece in my mind right now with just minimal amount of work and from here on out I know it will work the environment will look good all I need to do is model detail UV and then of course texture and light but early in this process I already know it's going to work and I already like it so at this point you go back to Maya and begin to model further you have the template you have the blueprint of the environment the shell and you keep that and then you just begin to model further add detail and build on the environment so you can create the rest of the environment now the important part at this point right now I did not save the scene I did a lot of testing just bringing things in testing and then deleting it so because I did not name anything because I wanted to just test an experiment um I went ahead and not saved this scene because this is just a blackout and in the end I will have a different set of static meshes and they will all be named correctly and this was just a test and I just went back to Maya so I can begin the modeling process since now I know the environment looks correct the lighting would look good and I just need to start working the environment and actually model everything so I began the modeling process here's the first iteration where I just kind of began to create the staircase work on the stairs I expanded environment a little further out so it's a little bit wider I still continue to export everything and do that test import to see the completed work back in u5 so I did that quite a lot and again I did not save that's a very important part I did not save any of it when I imported it then I would come back to Maya and continue modeling further here is the next variation originally I wanted to include glass instead of railing but then I opted out of having glass cuz I wanted to have more of a older kind of abandoned environment so glass wouldn't fit but you can see I began to add more detail to the columns more detail for the platform more detail for the stairs uh there's now railing here at the top platforms at the top have more detail the entire staircase and the curved walkway was complete as well as more detail for the columns in the back and I began to experiment with adding the doorways for some of the upper the second floor where the platforms would go across here was the third variation again I just continued to add more and more detail now all of these have railings more detail was added for the Upper Floor I now have uh doors and door handles for everything up upstairs as well as towards the end and again just more detail just kind of contining to go through the process of refining and doing additional passes of adding detail to modeling also continuously exported everything by selecting all the pieces and exporting them as one single fbx of course in this case because I have a wall on the front I would just move that out but then I would uh zero out the transformation as well as for the two pieces for the ceiling zero out so their position back and then I would export all this in their position and import into to u5 now the important part of a lot of this process is uh once you begin to construct I did zero out a lot of the Transformations this means that once I had let's say the sphere position where I wanted in Maya you can see the translation are all zeroed out this allows me to always bring back the geometry exactly where I need it to be in my as I construct the environment so if I move it by accident or if I need to move it I can always bring it back uh when I need to export so this is why for the wall as well as for the cylinder all zeroed out I just needed to move them out of the way so they're not in view so I can continue modeling and then I just move them back so I can go ahead and Export and test and here was the final modeled environment all the detail has been complete every single piece and the transformation has been frozen to0 so again if I have a move it if or if I need to move it I can always bring it back so this is the final environment and also the important part here is I renamed everything so you can see every single piece of geometry has a name so these are the names that are going to be included inside u5 and it just makes things easier for me so it don't have that default name of cube or sphere or whatever assigned when I work in u5 and just makes searching inside u5 easier so everything has been renamed and let me go ahead and Export this and show you what the final modeled environment looks like a new5 so let me position this back again the process was exactly the same as before I just simply select everything that I want to export and you can see my scale box I'm a scale human the references that I use are all locked so I am not exporting those I'm just exporting the geometry then again you go to file export selection all the options are the same and I'm just going to overwrite over the scene test so all the geometry gets exported into that single fpx file now back in ue5 I would usually have already deleted and cleared so I can just print in a new scene with all the new meshes but let me show you if you happen to still have all the old meshes in here and you didn't delete it uh you need to delete it from the level so you can import that new piece new fpx with all the new meshes so first you need to remove everything from your level and make sure that nothing is left over then you can take all the meshes that you imported including the materials and just delete them from the level if it says Force delete you usually don't want to force delete it because it's going to leave empty references so you just make sure you need to remove it from the level first maybe even save that level and restart the level and then uh delete it from the content browser so make sure it says delete and not force delete so I'm going to go ahead and remove it now everything is clean and I can go ahead and uh bring in the new version so again I'm just going to take that scene test fpx and just drag it into appropriate folder all the options are going to stay the same and let's go ahead and import then just grab all of the static meshes and not any materials that were created so I have three materials created and I'll show you what that means uh because I separated some meshes to have multiple material slots but you select all the meshes drag them into the level and then make sure with all of them still selected you zero out the location so now they're all positioned exactly how they are positioned in Maya and you avoid any problems if you have a move them and you can see that every single mesh has scene uncore test which is the name of the scene that you exported so it depends the name of the scene and then the name of the mesh so of course uh your final scene should not have scene test for me for my uh meshes for my final map all the static meshes were named Globe staircase scene uncore name of the mesh so just name it appropriately for your final import and here it is the final environment modeled and imported and again the beauty of this it looks exactly how you modeled Maya and I did not have to construct this over again by exporting modular separate static meshes and then having to reconstruct this environment in u5 so that was the modeling process that I used to create this entire environment in Maya and then bring it into u5 and have everything be matched up one to one exactly what I modeled the Maya was transferred over into u5 without me having to reconstruct it next I want to cover the UV in process so in this final environment every single mesh has been uvd let me go ahead and open up the UV editor all of the meshes will use tile and textures and many of these meshes if I select them you can see they are overlapping textures overlapping UVS but that's by Design because it's going to have the same texture applied to many of the faces of these meshes and since they're going to be reputable is going to contain the same texture many of these UVS can be overlapped and sitting on top of each other another thing you'll notice is the UVS the 0 to1 space this is where you usually unwrap your UVS in position inside that 0 to1 space however these meshes their UVS extend beyond 0 to one space and again also that is okay because I'm using Talon textures and I matched the texal density from all these meses to be the same so this way there's no difference in the texture resolution when I begin to apply the textures so every single one of these shells has the same texal density and if I come over here into transform scroll down and let me go ahead select a shell and I click get most of the shells will have 5.12 as a texal density if I select the stairs for example we go ahead and select them go to UV shell click get you can see it's very similar the stairs are a little smaller but as long as they are within the same similar range the resolution will look good on all the meshes let me go ahead select the platform go to UV shell and click get you can see 5.12 and if I go ahead and just select any of them they will have the texal density set to very close to 5.1 and maybe slightly smaller here and there but not by much and this was by Design because I wanted to maintain the texal density the same across all meshes so when I apply a texture on it you will not get low resolution on on one piece of geometry and then high resolution of that texture on another piece of geometry and this was very important for me to do so how did I arrive at that texal density number first you have to decide for every 1 meter of geometry or 100 cm by 100 cm what is the texture resolution do you want to have so for 1X 1 meter you could have a texture size that is a power of two starting at two pixels and doubling every time you go up so it would be 4 8 16 32 64 128 256 1024 and so on all the way up to 8192 thus increasing the texture resolution size for that piece of world geometry and this is your standard metric of deciding how much texture resolution you're going to have for the 1X one met of geometry of world space this is where you start and then of course you can have larger geometry but for larger geometry pieces you still use the same dexal density so here I have a plane that is 1 M by 1 M or 100 cm by 100 cm and the resolution of this piece of geometry I decided to have at 512 pixels by 512 pixels meaning that if I have a texture that's 512 x 512 it should be mapped onto 1 M by 1 M of geometry and if I have geometry that is let's say 2 by two or 200 by 200 centimet of geometry so slightly bigger let me uh just kind of duplicate this mannequin so for geometry that is 2 m by 2 m I would need a texture with resolution of 1024x 1024 or 512 by tiled two times but my texal density for this piece of geometry wall geometry would still be at the same value so if I select the shell and I CLI get this number will change but underneath the map size I would increase it to 1024 because that would be my texture resolution in order to map it onto a 2X two World piece of geometry and I click get same number same texal density and one more example if I had a wall that is 4 M by 4 m in order to maintain the texal density across this geometry I would need a 2048 texture and if I click get on this shell same texal density or again I could use a 1K texture for this wall but I would need to tile it two times in order to maintain the same texal density so for a 4x4 wall I would need a map size of 2048 to keep that same textual density that same information within that texture so no resolution would appear out of place when objects are placed next to each other so essentially for every meter of geometry I have 512 pixels of texture information that's going to be contained in it and that's what I decided to do you could have for one meter of geometry and use 1024 or 1K texture map to display the information the resolution of that texture or you could have a 2K texture for every 1 meter or even a 4K and the higher texture resolution you introduce for one meter of Geometry The Closer you can come up to it and see all the detail within that texture so your geometry your world your architecture will look really good up close and usually the standard for most games and of course it varies a lot depending on art style but it varies between 512 pixels for every 1 meter all the way up to 4K for every 1 meter so it all depends on your target platform and there's just many different considerations you would have to take but if you stick anywhere between 512 and 2K for every 1 meter you should be in good spot so for this environment I went with a more moderate size 1 m equals 512 pixel texture resolution so what I did was in order to determine this number I simply created a plane that's 100 by 100 this size right here this would be a 512 by 512 texture so in in my texal density size I went ahead and on the map size entered 512 selected the shell and click get and that gave me the number so that means from here on out if I wanted to take this UV shell and by default it would be some other size it wouldn't be at this texal density because I changed it so for example it could be very small when you map it it could be working here but then I wanted to make sure that all the UV shell had the same texal density so they retain the same texture information and resolution across all my geometry so then I would select that shell I knew what my texal density number was and I would just select that shell and click set and that resized it for me and in this case this texal density or the size of the UV shell is very large cuz I'm I'm mapping it to a 512 texture and uh the textures that I was going to use in quickel Bridge I was going to download 248x 2048 texture resolution so I needed to go ahead and uh actually tap that in and set that UV shell because all my textures were going to be that size they were going to be a 2048x 2048 and I knew that ahead of time and then I resized all my shelves to retain this map size and retain this texal density and also in a lot of the tal textures you could simply increase the tiling of textures that you apply onto geometry in order to kind of uh work and deal with this inconsistent texture resolution across your geometry if you didn't set everything across your geometry to the same texal density so you would have to play around with the tiling in u5 through the material editor now if this does not make any sense uh this comes from experience with UV and then applying textures onto your meshes at certain texture resolutions then seeing them together so the more you work with modeling the more you work with UV and texturing your assets it begins to make a lot more sense so as a beginner if you want to learn and begin to create your assets with a lot more accuracy and then youv in them with proper workflow and proper technique take a look at the course I created Maya Foundation home study course it'll teach you everything you need to know about modeling and then you V in your meshes properly so the final word on the texal density is my geomet R I decided to use for every meter of geometry in World space it was going to use 512 pixels of texture resolution and one last thing remember in uh UNR 4 and UNR 5 the height of a character is 180 cm in height so almost 2 m and that should also help you to determine what texture resolution you should want for every meter of Your World space now let me touch on having different material slots on static meshes so I do have multiple material slots on certain static meshes here so for example this wall if uh if I select this uh static mesh and inside the details panel I have material slot one and two and of course if I double click and open up a static mesh editor I also have it here as well so I can assign a texture to certain parts of geometry or assign a material to certain parts of geometry and I I can have two different materials on here and if I take a look at this actually this is a door let me select something else this wall and inside static MCH editor I can go ahead and isolate it'll show me which parts have material lamber 2 or whatever the material I saw onto this later and here's another one so I can have two different materials for the pillars one for the pillar and one for the walls and that's what I end up doing so that way I have a little bit of variety on a static mesh instead of at the same material being applied to everything here and I did this to quite a few meshes such as this uh platform in the center it has three so it just allows me to have some variety of materials on various static meshes and like I said the way I am going to texture this and the way I did texture as I'm kind of going through the making of I use quickel Bridge Mega scans the materials and the decals that are provided there so that way I just download what I need and then I just drag them onto the parts of the mesh that I need the materials to be on so the way you do that inside your 3D modeling application and specifically inside Maya is you create a another Lambert so by default everything gets Lambert one assigned to your geometry this gray material so if I open up hypers shade here's the Lambert one it's always inside the scene and it's always applied on on your geometry that when you create a new model so if I right click I can choose select objects in initial shading group so it will select everything that has a lamberd one applied to it and then I created another lamberd by simply going into the create panel and created A lamber 2 and lamber 3 and then I assigned lamber 2 and lamber 3 for however many material idas I would want on that mesh to the faces of that geometry so for lamber 2 if I just select all the faces here's lamber 2 and then just maybe a couple of static meeses I think it's just the center yeah it's just a center has third material IDE applied so whenever you apply different materials onto certain parts of the geometry by selecting the faces so for example let me go to face component mode so for example I just selected the faces and then the face component mode you right click and go to assign existing material and assign a different material so that allows you to have on import that second material slot or the third material slot depending however many materials you applied and assigned to those faces in Maya so with that with everything you read and certain parts of the geometry certain meshes having two or three material ID these and then all of the modeling finished of course because you do your modeling first then you do your UV in process second then I went ahead and exported everything placed everything into uh where it needed to be then selected the geometry that I was going to export that that I needed to export minus of course any scale references and then went to file export selection and reexport it as a new scene or override in an existing scene and then importing it into 5 using the exact same method I've showed you so far let me briefly talk about making changes and updates to your geometry or UVS so if you're environment is done and your UVS are completed and you've already exported and you saved everything everything has its own unique name and if you were going to make changes to update to either the UVS or you wanted to add some modeling detail you can still do that by simply editing the mesh that you need to make changes for while keeping the same name or if you need to make any updates to UVS you can do that as well and then simply reselect everything again and reexport into that same single fpx file then when you are inside u5 you still have the same names and you basically just select the mesh that you need to reort so let's say it was this platform find it inside the content browser uh you can find quickly by selecting inside the level hitting control B this will selected inside the content browser and then right click on it and reort this will reimport that mesh and then just save it now if you happen to let's say take parts of the mesh uh begin to duplicate them and add additional meshes that are not inside u5 at the moment and you begin to have new meshes with new names then at that point I would probably reexport everything into that same fbx file so everything is brand new again but then inside u5 this is where I would delete everything from the level delete everything from the content browser and then repport as a brand new fpx so that way you get the new meshes all the updates and the new names and everything is a brand new asset on import so you don't have to deal with inconsistencies of different meshes being added removed different names having to find and import them individually or anything like that you just simply delete everything and reort it as one single mesh like I've showed you and this is why I recommend that you don't save anything as you do the export import for testing purposes for experimentation until you are done modeling your environment and done uing it and you've named everything so that way you know everything you bring in is completed but then again if you need to repport anything as brand new extra meses that it's a quick process by simply deleting and reimporting and then just zeroing out the locations for all the meshes inside the level next let's cover collisions so on import we generated missing collisions means that u5 will create collisions for you based on Geometry now they're not going to be perfect especially for more complex curved geometry but it's often a good start and for many Cube like objects that's enough now if this is a standalone environment where it's not playable you're not going to be spawning in it running around then you do not need any collisions you essentially created the environment just to take screenshots to a fly through maybe it's for your portfolio but you're not going to be spawning and walking through it but anytime I create I like to to create something that you can explore or even just stand around and move a little bit just so you get to experience the full 3d not just a still image and for this I had to tweak the collisions that u5 generated so the first thing you can do is just take a look at the collisions inside the level by going to show and enable collisions all C and for many of these objects many of these meshes collisions are going to be unusable uh some things here on the side those can be used just fine you just won't be able to walk maybe in between these pillars but for like these uh railings these are pretty good for many of these are they're just fine as they are for again for any Cube like objects that don't have any intricate detail or any curved geometry most of the collisions are going to do just fine but also it's hard to see what's going on if you use this mode so let me go ahead and disable it let's go ahead and spawn and then you'll know exactly what you would need to tweak so I'm going to play from here and as soon as you begin to walk around well first of all we can't even walk onto this rounded platform and we won't be able to walk up up the stairs at all uh here I'll be able to walk but the stairs would need to be tweaked then most of the the rest of the environment you can pretty much walk around anywhere and everything just works just fine again I won't be able to walk in here if I need it then I would need to tweak those collisions uh so primarily collisions need to be tweaked and changed for the sphere for the rounded platform for some of the stairs and of course the curved platform and the curved stairs so how do we do that first you need to open up the static mesh editor for each of these meshes let's go ahead and uh deal with the railing and the staircase going to select it inside the level press contrl + B to find it inside the Cent browser let's open this up to see the collisions that u5 generated go to show and enable simple collisions and you can see this is unusable so what you could do is option number one is create custom collisions in Maya and then export them along with the mesh or along with the single fbx that's going to take a little bit of time because there is a naming convention that you have to follow and you have to create the geometry to be very similar to the actual aesthetic mesh the easier way to do this is inside u5 so you can select existing collision and delete it now if I save it it will have no collisions and then you can use under collisions drop down menu and have any of these presets to generate collisions now most of these will not work for this type of geometry but for many other type of geometry it will work but this is more complex it's a curved staircase so none of these will work the other option you can do is inside convex decomposition in here I can uh Define whole count number of Primitives for collision and how many verts I want per hole per perimet of collision and then uh the Precision so you can TW around these Val Val so let's just do one let's generate maybe 16 it's going to take a little bit of time the more you pump up these values but uh it could give you more accurate Collision I don't want to put these too much let's go ahead and hit apply and see what happens so here's the result and it's much better this might be usable let me go ahead and save and just spawn and take a look I'm going to close this for a second and uh I actually let me see if I can spawn on top of this I might not be able to and I might not be able to actually test this because of the curvature of the staircase but basically let me open this back up but basically uh this might be usable just to to the Collision seems like I should be able to walk on top of this no problem so de convex decomposition is pretty good tool to generate quick collisions that are simple and then you could use right away and if none of them work you just simply select any of the holes and you can delete them right from here or you can go to collisions and remove all collisions I'm going to have and leave that for now so let's go ahead and save this and uh so we can come back to it the other way you can do this is by selecting the mesh and enable in your property inside static mesh editor called use complex Collision as simple so every static mesh can have per poly Collision meaning that I can have Collision based on the mesh itself rather than primitive holes that are created around it this is not ideal for gameplay because it's expensive and ideally you do want to create your own collisions either in u5 or in Maya so you need those Collision holes that are much simpler but if it's a standalone environment it's not a game playable environment you're not going to be creating a game out of it this is a great quick way to create very accurate collisions so you can just experience the environment by walking through it and playing through it so let's go ahead and select this rail I'm going to press control+ B to find it let's open this up and here's how to enable it let me show you what the default Collision look looks like for this show simple Collision complete unusable you can't even walk into it so U I can go ahead and delete it or I can leave it for this case I'm going to delete it and let's go into the details panel I'm going to scroll down two collisions uh right here under Collision complexity I want to change project default and enable complex Collision as simple so this will use complex Collision per poy of the actual mesh as simple collision and it will get highlighted and you can see it's extremely accurate basically it's just following the static mesh so if I save it close it and let's do the same thing for this one so I can actually spawn uh let me quickly do this I'm going to do the same exact thing scroll down and use complex Collision of simple close it and let me do one more for the railing and actually for the platform so that way I can actually work through it uh Press contrl B let me find it again and enable this property save it and one more for this one right here and use complex cion as simple now I should be able to spawn right on top and I'll be able to walk up and actually for the stairs when we generated that decomposition hole it works pretty well but I could also do the same thing for the stairs just use complex Collision of simple and now I can go ahead and uh go upstairs and the rest of the Collision here works pretty well and for the sphere that looks fine to me and again I'm using this only for be able to walk through this environment and experience it in third person or first person so I can actually enjoy and see the environment from player point of view rather than just grab a screenshot or a video fly through so this is how I dealt with collisions for this environment the next step in the process is texturing now to keep up with the theme of texturing new environments quickly I decided not to manually create the textures using substance painter instead I decided to use Cel Bridge Mega scan materials and decals many of the materials in quickel Bridge are already tileable so that works for the Stop environment and all I have to do is just find them download them bring them into this project and begin to apply them onto different surfaces different meshes to decide which ones I want to use now you have access to quickel bridge right here on the window quixel bridge and this is where you can download 3D assets to detail your environments with 3D plants surfaces is what I primarily use to texture the walls and the floor and the ceiling and everything else inside the environment as well as decals we'll cover decals in a bit but right now it's all about using surfaces or materials now if you want to learn how to use quickel bridge to download all of your assets and then texture your environments with or detail your environments with 3D assets as well as decals take a look at the tutorial I did for using quickel bridge for u5 and I go into detail on how to use quickel Bridge so once you've gone through quixel bridge and you downloaded your the surfaces the materials that you wanted to try things out with and apply to static meshes uh everything that you download will be kept from Mega scans from Cel bridge will be kept inside the meask folder and then here I have 3D assets decals and surfaces and on the surfaces I have a bunch of concrete that I downloaded uh some painted metal and many other ones I did not use all of them I just simply downloaded a bunch that I think would look cool on the environment and to start using them you simply select the one that you want to use make sure you find the material instance inside that folder and just start dragging them onto surfaces if you don't like that one you just simply swap it out for something else maybe swap it onto the floor if you don't like that one you just find the one that you do like that kind of fits the theme and this is a really quick way to texture your environment because uh the textures and the material instances and the material itself already created and you just need to find the one you want to use and just drag them onto your meshes now you can apply uh many of these material instances to the local asset inside the level or you can apply it to the static mesh editor level which will apply to every instance inside the level but again all of these meshes are unique so in this case in this particular workflow um I did not use static mesh Editor to apply the static meshes because these meshes are unique so this mesh is unique mesh so is this even though they are the same inside Maya inside u5 they are separate meshes so that's just part of the workflow that I use that has that one downside that that the meshes that were duplicated in Maya when you import them into u5 they're essentially separate meshes and not the same mesh being used twice and that was my entire texturing process workflow you just find the material instance or the material that you want to use and just drag them onto these surfaces and begin to find uh the theme and the look for the environment now one important part when you begin to work with different materials and start dragging them onto walls and here's another level of uh having different material IDs so for like for this wall I have two material IDs to this so that allows me to have one material on certain parts of the mesh and then another one for let's say the pillars so because you're going to be using different materials that may have uh certain materials are going to be darker others are going to be lighter uh it helps to switch over unlet mode so that way you get to see the albo the color texture without any lighting and then you can begin to tweak using the material instance properties that are provided for you to make them match in saturation and in brightness so uh this help me a lot to texture the environment because if you just simply drag many of these to certain parts you know many of these will be just too dark and I already tweaked a lot of these like for example may maybe this color just doesn't match it's uh too saturated and it's kind of hard to tell using a lit mode because we haven't lit this environment at all it just has the default letting but then when you switch over to the unlit mode you can see it in more uniformity and you can kind of make sure that all the textures and all the materials have very similar saturation and color so if you open up any of the material instances for Mega scans you'll have many properties for you to adjust how that material looks inside the level so for this I would change the albo tint I could change the color maybe make it darker in this case actually I would want to under albo controls let's enable this and uh desaturated a bit so I would maybe do 0. five and make it brighter 1.5 so that kind of matches a little bit more to towards the walls rather than have that more of a brown color to it and I use this quite a lot to make sure that my albo in unlet mode matched and had that uniformity to it and here's the final textured environment with all the adjustments made to the different materials that I used um let me go ahead and disable the decals so you get to see it purely textured without any decals so you can see that there is a uniform quality to it nothing is too bright or too dark and the colors kind of match between each other so this is one important tip that I suggest you begin using whether you use Mega scan materials or your own and here is the final lit environment without any decals so let me put it back to mode next part of the process come the decals a decal is a material that can be projected onto other materials and helping you to add additional layer of detail without having to add that detail such as cracks dirt leakage into the main material itself also in addition to that many of the textures the materials that I use for meas scans are clean meaning they're tilable and they look pretty good across a larger surface there's no seemingly repeatable pattern well there's some but mostly you can use them across a large surface and there is a minimal repeatable pattern but to add a bit more history bit more story and to break up the tilable textures that meas scans has is to use decals and I use decals in this environment in this project to Doty things up and to introduce that level of damage that I did not want to introduce into modeling so most of this environment was modeled with basic shapes it's clean it's smooth but with textures and then with decals you can really doy this up so right now I have decals turned off and if I go ahead and enable them it really brings the environment and then chuses it with a bit more history and a bit more life so it has dirt it has numbers it has uh water leakage it has some Pebbles some cracks and I could continue you know adding additional passes of this grunge and this dirt through this environment with decals alone all these decals were also from quickel bridge Mega scans and you'll find many of decals to use to download and apply onto your surface onto athetic meshes on decals category and you can do leakage you can do concrete and many more again refer to the guide quiel bridge that I did for an in-depth look on how to use decals how to download them and how to just use them inside your projects with all the settings for so due to the type of the environment this was decals were a great addition to add more detail into this environment with many of the decals that I used I also changed some of the properties inside the material instance so for example uh let me find this right here this kind of projection not the Pebbles but let me lift this up select this kind some of this concrete detail let me find this detail inside the meask folder simply press contrl + B just like you do in static meshes to find the decal inside the content browser if I double click on this and take a look what it's doing let me move this out of the way for just a little bit you can adjust the albo color overlay overlay intensity and then of course opacity intensity these two values I used a lot and actually those are the Pebbles let me go ahead and make sure I select this one right here press control + B again let's open that one up so this helps a lot to match the decal to the surface behind it uh by default a lot of these just they were too strong the decals were very strong and by adjusting a lot of these you can kind of blend them to the surface more or less depending on the color of the material that they use in behind it and I used primarily the overlay intensity color overlay and opacity intensity to control how these decals look inside the environment and how much they're blended with the material behind it and a little sticker note that you see those are all decals inside the environment another useful thing with decals you can do in addition to kind of break up the repetition of the texture behind it is to hide seams so for example this decal right here uh the crack if I move it you can see a line so this is a separation a a texture SE seam and you can use this decal to position on top to hide those texture seams the one important thing about decals when you use them make sure that you are lowering the extent of projection box to only apply for specific uh area Yeah by default when you drag many of these meesh many of these decals the boundary box is going to be huge so you have to control the scale make it smaller and then make sure you make it smaller on z-axis in height so it only projects down for a small area and it's not uh trying to Encompass around the rest of the meshes uh around wherever you have that decal projection and if you don't want certain meshes to receive decals select that static mesh and inside the decals panel type in decal and you can uh disable receive decals and then that mesh will not receive any decals at all so decals were a very large part of uh detailing this environment and it added a lot to the funnel piece next up is lighting so once you have your texturing and decals done you have to light the environment so before you do any post process any color gring or add any fog you have to light it first because all these effects rely on the lighting to be done before you can apply them so this environment is lit with indirect lighting there is no direct lights that are hidden anything inside this tunnel inside this underground bunker and the only light is from up above from the direction light and it's only touching this upper portion and that's it and everything else is indirectly lit with bounced light so I actually have a couple of rectangular lights I'm going to turn them off temporarily and I'll come back to them in just a second and there are a couple of things going on in order for you to begin lighting uh in this case indirect lit environments the first thing of course is let's come back to post process volume this needs to be inside the scene because we are controlling two important properties as I mentioned before first we have uh Unbound infinite extent Unbound enabled means this postprocess volume will work for the entire environment and we don't have to be inside it for it to take effect and then exposure this is the most important part to get started now I went ahead and enabled M mode set it to manual exposure compensation is set to 14 as my final environment value and then also enabl apply physical camera exposure these are the properties that I use for this specific environment and I used this specific option the other option as I mentioned uh you can just simply enable minimum and maximum EV 100 values and set them both to one this will also disable auto exposure and you can kind of play around with these values to adjust the exposion inside the environment but instead of this option I use this one right here both will work and it just depends on which one you want to use more just this one gives you a little bit more control and I like the exposure compensation value so you can adjust it in order to have more light in certain parts of the environment in order to compensate for the exposure so that's the first part in in controlling your lighting the second part is of course having the liting actors inserted inside the level I used new level and the basic map template so that provides you with a directional light exponential height fog which we'll talk about later so in terms of lighting itself uh directional light it's already insed for you and then you have Sky atmosphere Skylight and these are the it's actually Skylight and directional light and then post process those are the three main actors that you need to begin to light with the sky atmosphere gives you a Sky Box around the level which works with the Skylight so you do need Sky atmosphere in order to make the Skylight work so Skylight will introduce indirectly lit lighting into your environment so if I went ahead and disable Skylight you can see we kind of uh we remove certain bound light from the environment and if you enable this then we can Infuse it with with more bounce light now for maybe for depending on the style of the environment you're going for maybe this is what you're going for so you just going to have to play around with the values and with the actors again it's all in the our direction that you taken but for this specific environment I want it to be more real to true life so I needed that Skylight so the Skylight enables you to have the indirectly bound slight in here and the few properties you want to take a look at when you're dealing with this is intensity scale so this will Infuse More Bounce light into the indirect environment areas so by default it was one and I just pumped it up just a little bit you can kind of see it but let me bump it up to five you can see it infuses with more light so I just bumped it up 1.5 the next important actor you need to adjust and you kind of go back and forth between these two the Skylight and the directional light so that's the next One Direction light uh you need to orient and kind of position and point your directional light the sunlight uh so it shines into your environment the way you want it to the way you do that so you don't have to select the actor cuz I I would have to find it somewhere it's actually right here in the center uh but you don't have to actually have the little cursor around it so you can position it if you press contrl L and just move the mouse as you hold down control L then you can kind of uh dynamically position the light anywhere inside your scene so you don't have to select that actor or you have to select it but you don't have to position the cursor over over the rotation Gizmo and then just find the way you would want it to light your environment let me go ahead and undo and I use this kind of angle to come in so I get to see some of the directional light actual light hidden the surfaces but so it can bounce more light into this uh interior and then of course for the properties for the direction of light I have intensity set and then I used temperature to make it a bit cooler so uh temperature allows you to control the temperature of the light in real world values lower will be warmer and higher will be cooler so it goes from uh 0 to 10,000 so if I bump this up to 10,000 it'll it'll be more cooler light if I go down to let's say 2500 it'll be more warmer light so 7500 it's usually good for Midday kind of the direction of the light midday sun and then you also have a good value I did not tweak this cuz I'll I'll show you something in post process that I did but you have indirect lighting intensity and this will also allow you in addition to the Skylight will allow you to control indirect lighting intensity inside the indirectly lit areas of the environment to kind of Infuse it with more bounce light so if I I left it at one but let's say you wanted to use that use this value you can type in two and you can see it infuses more light there is more bounced indirect light uh beginning to enter into this environment so I left this at one but that's a good value to also work with the other value that I adjusted to get more light from my textures from the materials from the albo is the diffuse boost and you get this property inside the postprocess volume so let me select it inside the details panel you go and search for Lumin and right here diffuse color boost so by default it was set to one you can see that kind of darkens it so what it does it uses the texture the Albedo color which has a lot to do with Lumen and it infuses more light and balances more light back into environment from the color of the albo texture so if I had all darker textures I would not get as much bounce light and if I had all bright white textures it would bounce a lot more light inside this environment uh so you can kind of compensate for the texture being darker by using the diffused color boost inside post process volume so I use it to and bumped it up to 1.5 so for example I can go all the way to five which is going to be very bright kind of unrealistic so 1.5 was my value so you use these three actors to start with the directional light the Skylight and then the postprocess volume and kind of working with the diffuse color boost now you don't always have to enable this you can uh do very similar things with the directional light but if you needed to have that extra boost from the color then postprocess volume is a great way to to adjust this value now when you are dealing with lighting indirect L lit environment basically no directional lights are in here and all you're using is in direct bounce light uh you can get some issues with Lumen having some flickering issues as well as there is just not enough bounce light so you're going to have you might have not always it depending how you light it but you might have some noise and some flickering going on so uh what can help a lot to light in direct lit environments is to introduce some additional direct light and I did this through a rectangular light so what I did was I inserted a direction light not a directional a rectangular light right here up above and you kind of hard to see but CU I disabled it but I'm going to go ahead and enable it actually let me come back and I'm going to unable it so I put a rectangle light up above and also one up above in the second hole so it kind of it drops in and infuses more light from a direct source not just from from the bounce light so here's the first one I inserted a rectangle light and I just made sure that it positioned right through the hole right here and it's pointing down and it's uh emitting more light into the environment and the property is I set for this I I just play around with intensity and then uh temperature same temperature as my directional light and I did the same thing I just copied it over for the other hole so essentially I have two additional rectangular lights that are infusing this in enironment with more light and it helps to eliminate any of those issues that you might have with Lumin with noise and flickering and that is it for lighting that's all I did uh only few actors to light the scene you just have to work with the values and adjust them properly while watching what's happening in your environment and one last thing I did do and you might also want to take a look at this property is in postprocess volume and let me type in Lumen if you're useing Lumen uh right here inside the Lum Global illumination final gather quality if you increase this can also help with noise and just increase the Fidelity and the quality you seen this does come at a performance cost but it will make your environments look better next is fog now you do need to have the preliminary lighting done through the direction light and the Skylight and whatever else you've inserted any other artificial lights for me was the rectangular light because the fog relies on the environment and its color from the lights to create the fog effect and I have two different fog actors I have the default exponential hide fog and let me go ahead and disable it and show you before and after so alt f is the shortcut key so if I enable you can see that without fog it looks very blind there's no atmosphere there's no viable mood to it and it's just it's missing something and then with the fog it just adds that much needed effect so the exponential height fog was inserted for me from the basic map template but of course you can find it inside the visual effects Tab and the properties that I tweaked were the fog density fog height fallof the fog ins scattering color just to match it to the scene and that was it so the I didn't tweak too many properties just enough to have fog kind of in the distance in the back of the environment and kind of match it up to the basic lighting that I've had set up and then for the rest of the color of the environment I could do that with color grading with postprocess volume which we'll cover in just a bit which was my last step and also in addition to the exponential he fog I do have right here on the bottom in below underground into those tunnels another actor another fog actor local high fog right here so if I go ahead and disable it if I didn't use this you can see that it it has a bit of a emissive quality to it and I had a hard time tweaking the exponential High fog but also at the same time trying to remove this kind of glow effect of the fog and I wasn't going to achieve that result so I needed another way to create a layer of fog only in areas specific areas of the environment but not getting rid of this effect that I like of the exponential height fog and the distance so to do this I use local height fog and kind of inserted an additional layer of fog below ground even further down into the ground ground and this is a new actor which you can find I'm using 5.3 and if you go to visual effects here's you have local height fog you can just drag this and it'll give you some properties for you to control and it's a local area fog so before you had to create a material apply to a mesh and just going to you know do more of the work by having to set that up but now you can use this actor and it gives you all the properties for it to control a fog density color and everything else for only specific areas of the environment where you want to have a local height fog so let me come back up and the only properties that tweaked for it is of course the density the fog height fallof offset scattering distribution again just playing around with the values until I get the result of the fog that I needed and the fog albo and then of course I also needed to resize the fog so it's only occupying this area of the environment underneath where the underground tunnels are and if I went ahead and move this it would uh remove that fog and introduce something else so it's a very specific area that I needed to have this local fog effect take place and local hide fog is a great way to do so so you can see that the fog added a great effect to the environment and without it it would just it would be missing something for the final step is color griding or color correction this is a post-process effect that gets applied to the entire scene or you could apply it to certain parts of the environment using various multiple post-process volumes you should have your entire environment completed textured and lit before you do any postprocess effects to it so this is the last layer the last step of your environment so for this environment I wanted to have multiple visual looks for it so to do this quickly without having to create multiple volumes with color grading settings applied in each I simply created multiple Luts Lut is an image that contains color information and by using post process volume and then L setting in it I can change what this environment will look like so I have post process volume here let me go ahead select it and if you scroll down or you can just search for Lut but you'll find it under miscellaneous right here color gring L let me go ahead and disable it so here's the default lighting and everything else applied to it kind of it's very Bland but it has everything done it has all the right settings intensities and as much color as I could get from the directional light and from the Skylight but then you do another pass for color grading for color correction so I did four different Luts so let me go ahead and enable so this is let me drag the first one so here's the first one here's the second one kind of gives you a different mood and feel for the environment here's the third one and here's the fourth one one warmer so the first three were cooler colors and the last one I wanted to try out a warm VI of warm color now you can do these very easily by grabbing a screenshot of your environment and then bringing it into Photoshop and then using adjustment layers to change the levels the brightness color balance contrast saturation and so on and then you save out an Lut image which is a small image that's 256x 16 that contains this color information and then you simply plug it in into to your post process volume color grading L section and then you have intensity the amount that you want to apply from that Lut I have an in-depth tutorial you may want to take a look at that takes you step by step on how to create these LS yourself and all the settings and properties you need to adjust and change to make it work so this was the last step in the process and this allowed me to quickly change out the look of the environment depending what I wanted to go with now there are many other effects that you can control with the uh postprocess volume I mean you have temperature you have Global you have shadows midtones this is a way to adjust color balance and saturation and contrast for each of the parts of the environment so if you weren't going to use Luts you would go through color grading section and adjust the global properties and then go into shadows midtones and highlights to control the color and saturation of the scene you also if you scroll up above you have image effects you have depth of field you can control and few other properties that you can adjust the final Outlook the final image and the visuals of your environment so postprocess volume has a lot of properties for you to change how your environment your final visuals of your environment will look so some final thoughts on this project this was a purely experimental project for an idea that I had for a while and I wanted to execute it but I just never found the time until I decided to jump in and experiment with a different workflow that I usually don't use and I found this to be a a very very quick way to get your environment done where the entire modeling process focused in Maya you can detail you can UV then you can quickly bring things in into u5 just to check how it will look you can even quickly light it get a mood and feel and the scale and the dimensions and proportions and the overall Vibe of the place of the environment and I go back and continue modeling further so this eliminated a lot of the modular creation that you would usually have to do and then having to reconstruct the environment back and u5 which sometimes takes some time because you have to set up the module pieces you have to test them and then you have to recreate the environment and this process was way faster now of course there are downsides and major downside is I can't expand on the environment because the everything is its own unique static mesh and all the pivot Points and World Origins so it's not like I can just take something and then duplicate it and continue to create the environment it would make it difficult to do I could but then I should have used a different workflow so I had no intention of expanding on the environment past this point also for the type of environment this was this was a large architectural setpiece environment it worked perfectly with Talent textures so this allowed me to also use Mega scan surfaces and texture this environment very quickly and I may not have been able to use this if I had more unique pieces that needed to be textured individually such as for many specific assets that have to have specific specific areas of texturing done and of course for props props usually need to be uniquely textured not always but for the most part this process would not have worked for some other environment so I will definitely continue to use this process I love this workflow and when the right criteria for the environment shows up I will absolutely come back and reuse this workflow for another project now if you want to learn how to create your own custom game environments how to model how to UV as as well as how to use ue5 to create and light with take a look at a series of Premium tutorial courses that I have on worlder levd design.com it'll take you from the very beginning and guide you through through every step for how to begin using Maya for modeling nuv and how to begin using u5 to create and to light with

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Length: 77min 21sec (4641 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 07 2024